Script: Measure Rig Performance

As a rigger you have to get along with the animators, and a good startingpoint for that is to provide them with fast rigs. If the animators have to playblast for each time they want to see the actual animation, they are going to waste a lot of time!

I often find myself implementing a lot of stuff in a rig, stuff I think the animators may need. As I’m improving my rigs, I get more nodes and more calculations going on to achieve what I want – which in the end may result in performance issues with the rig when animating. I’m trying to find out if there’s some way to measure the performance of a rig-component? I find it really hard to find out which components that slows down my rig, as I have to add and animate all of the rig-components together, and then try to compare the playback-speed, remove components, re-check, etc. How do you guys approach this? Also, is there any documentation of speed differences for expressions vs nodes, extra joints vs corrective blendshapes, skinClusters vs wrapDeformers, constraints vs normal parenting, etc?

I got a lot of interesting answers in the thread, but one in particular from Josh Carey (a mentor on Rigging Dojo) helped a lot. He tipped me off on dgtimer, which does exactly what I asked for. So I’ve just wrapped this into a clean little script.

The Script
The script measures the speed by playing off the scene and evaluating each DG node’s performance, which means that for the object(s) to actually be evaluated you have to animate each component (that you want to be included in the evaluation) over a given timespan, the more frames you calculate from the more accurate the results will be.

So if you have a rig that runs too slow, you can use this script to see which node(s) that does the hardest impact on the performance. You often find that it’s just a couple of nodes that really takes onto the percentage, stuff like wrap deformers are something you want to avoid (at least in the proxy-rig) 🙂

Video Demonstration:
I’ve uploaded a video to demonstrate how it can be used, in the video I’m using it to compare normal parenting, direct connections, constraints and skinclusters.